October 23, 2011

A Happy Filmmaker

Filmmaker Chris Gavin blogged yesterday that he had used music from Magnatune under our Creative Commons terms, and now Youtube has asked him to join their "partnership" status, where he makes money sharing ad revenue with them. He came back to us at Magnatune to ask about getting the right kind of commercial license for the music, and writes about his experience:

One consequence of the YouTube approach, is that I've decided to secure the appropriate licence on the sound track of the film to enable the agreement to go ahead.

Fortunately back in 2008, I was (and still remain) fairly scrupulous about music usage rights on my films, and I had sought music from www.magnatune.com Under the terms and conditions they had then, I was able to buy the album and use it for internet distribution of a non profit-making film.

Now that the YT partnership has been offered, I got back in touch with Magnatune last night and got a very speedy and reasonable deal to 'upgrade' to a more suitable licence to reflect this change in circumstances.

I can say that not only is Magnatune a great source for new and varied music, but that they also very much have their act together in terms of enabling film-makers to effectively and affordably gain the licences they need to use the music in productions.

Now, I only wish there was a way of retrospectively improving the video quality of the old YouTube film. Three years ago, there was no HD option on YouTube only something called 'HQ mode' which seems to have been scrapped since then.

Thanks Chris! I'm happy you're happy! (grin)

A nice example of the free-use-brings-commercial-licensing business model...